The late anthropologist maintains that the pirate culture of Madagascar was a major influence on thinkers like Hobbes and Locke.

David Graeber’s posthumous book, “Pirate Enlightenment,” is a reminder of the joys of reading the popular anthropologist.

In his last book, the iconoclastic anthropologist David Graeber considers evidence that maritime outlaws created utopian political communities on the island in the Indian Ocean.

Nika Dubrovsky speaks to Noam Chomsky about pirate societies, ‘bewildered herds’ and the fragility of the present in the context of the late anthropologist David Graeber’s final book

An anthropologist argues that experimental communities in Madagascar influenced the European Enlightenment

"In the last of his publications, Graeber writes in Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia about the role of pirates in developing some of the core tenets of the Enlightenment. He pulls from the ethnographic field research that he conducted for his doctoral thesis in Madgascar, beginning what he thought would be an extended essay that turned in the process into a short book. He wields a host of different accounts of the time period, contending with their contradictions and mythological slants to create a tentative narrative about the Golden Age of Piracy."

The true, swashbuckling lives of matriarchs, anarchists, and pirates at the crossroads of the world.